Well, the particular scenario I had in mind was a democratic one (where the MDDTers believe in democracy), and the eligible TDTers could win every election if they (nearly) all voted, and where the MDDTers vote in unison for stupid policies. And the questions is whether the TDT algorithm outputs "vote"; their decision not to vote is not an assumption (though perhaps they agree that, at least per CDT rules, voting is pointless).
If you're asking what the proposed non-voting TDT-compliant alternative is, and if it would involve keeping a democratic system, then I'll say what I should have earlier: I don't know -- that's something I was trying to find out from those who disagreed with me. One of them said that any amount of effort spent voting would be better spent propagandizing, so there is no margin where the TDTer deems voting optimal.
I was skeptical: once you accept that TDTers "naturally" make correlated decisions (in this type of problem), your vote "controls" something much more effective (the decision of a majority of voters). Then, even under generous assumptions about alternate uses of your voting effort, and aggregating this across all TDTers, and recognizing the mind-shields that various levels of drones put up, it's not clear why propagandizing is better.
To the extent that the drones are maximally mindless, your propaganda does nothing to change their minds, either on the object level (this election) or meta level (which political system is best). To the extent that the drones are "reasonable", a certain fraction of their votes will go toward the TDT-favored policies anyway, further reducing the threshold TDTers have to meet to get good policies.
I was skeptical: once you accept that TDTers "naturally" make correlated decisions (in this type of problem), your vote "controls" something much more effective (the decision of a majority of voters). Then, even under generous assumptions about alternate uses of your voting effort, and aggregating this across all TDTers, and recognizing the mind-shields that various levels of drones put up, it's not clear why propagandizing is better.
That is approximately my thinking too.
...To the extent that the drones are maximally mindless, your pr
Follow-up to: Politics as Charity
Can we think well about courses of action with low probabilities of high payoffs?
Giving What We Can (GWWC), whose members pledge to donate a portion of their income to most efficiently help the global poor, says that evaluating spending on political advocacy is very hard:
This sequence attempts to actually work out a first approximation of an answer to this question, piece by piece. Last time, I discussed the evidence, especially from randomized experiments, that money spent on campaigning can elicit marginal votes quite cheaply. Today, I'll present the state-of-the-art in estimating the chance that those votes will directly swing an election outcome.
Disclaimer
Politics is a mind-killer: tribal feelings readily degrade the analytical skill and impartiality of otherwise very sophisticated thinkers, and so discussion of politics (even in a descriptive empirical way, or in meta-level fashion) signals an increased probability of poor analysis. I am not a political partisan and am raising the subject primarily for its illustrative value in thinking about small probabilities of large payoffs.
Two routes from vote to policy: electing and affecting
In thinking about the effects of an additional vote on policy, we can distinguish between two ways to affect public policy: electing politicians disposed to implement certain policies, or affecting [2] the policies of existing and future officeholders who base their decisions on electoral statistics (including that marginal vote and its effects). Models of the probability of a marginal vote swaying an election are most obviously relevant to the electing approach, but the affecting route will also depend on such models, as they are used by politicians.
The surprising virtues of naive Fermi calculation
One objection comes from modeling each vote as a flip of a biased coin. If the coin is exactly fair, then the chance of a tie goes with 1/(sqrt(n)). But if the coin is even slightly removed from exact fairness, then the chance of a tie rapidly falls to neglible levels. This was actually one of the first models in the literature, and recapitulated by LessWrongers in comments last time.
However, if we instead think of the bias of the coin itself as sampled from a uniform distribution, then we get the same result as Schwitzgebel. In the electoral context, we can think of the coin's bias as reflecting factors with correlated effects on many voters, e.g. the state of the economy, with good economic results favoring incumbents and their parties.
Fermi, meet data
How well does this hold up against empirical data? In two papers from 1998 and 2009, Andrew Gelman and coauthors attempt to estimate the probability a voter going into past U.S. Presidential elections should have assigned to casting a decisive vote. They use standard models that take inputs like party self-identification, economic growth, and incumbent approval ratings to predict electoral outcomes. These models have proven quite reliable in predicting candidate vote share and no more accurate methods are known. So we can take their output as a first approximation of the individual voter's rational estimates [3].
It is possible to make sensible estimates of the probability of at least some events that have never happened before, like tied presidential elections, and use them in attempting efficient philanthropy.
[1] At least for two-boxers. More on one-boxing decision theorists at a later date.
[2] There are a number of arguments that voters' role in affecting policies is more important, e.g. in this Less Wrong post by Eliezer. More on this later.
[3] Although for very low values, the possibility that our models are fundamentally mistaken looms progressively larger. See Ord et al.
[4] Including other relevant sorts of competitiveness, e.g. California is typically a safe state in Presidential elections, but there are usually competitive ballot initiatives.